The Private Life of Public Finance: Confessions of a Recovering Investment Banker. This item is unavailable.The Private Life of Public Finance: Confessions of a Recovering Investment Banker

The son of a steelworker from Pennsylvania tells the inside story, warts and all, of his career as a successful investment banker at two of the biggest, best-known, and most controversial firms in the world—Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase—during a historic and turbulent period in US history. Mark Melio’s personal anecdotes and observations illustrate the self-absorbed culture, hypocrisy, and rapacious practices of Wall Street’s leading banks, how he bought into the fiction that “the customer always comes first,” and how investment banks morphed from once-proud partnerships into predators in constant search of new ways to scalp clients. This is a rare glimpse by a thoughtful observer behind the scenes of an institution that built America’s “new” economy and then nearly destroyed it.

From 1987 until 1996, Mark T. Melio was a senior banker in the public finance department at Goldman, Sachs & Co. For the next twelve years he worked first at J.P. Morgan & Co. and then its successor, JPMorgan Chase, where he rose to become head of the firm's public finance business. He left Wall Street in 2009 to found Melio & Company, an independent fiduciary and financial advisory firm serving public and private not-for-profit healthcare and higher education institutions.